GINGUENÉ, PIERRE LOUIS (1748-1815), French author, was born on the 27th of April 1748 at Rennes, in Brittany. He was educated at a Jesuit college in his native town, and came to Paris in 1772. He wrote criticisms for the _Mercure de France_, and composed a comic opera, _Pomponin_ (1777). _The Satire des satires_ (1778) and the _Confession de Zulmé_ (1779) followed. _The Confession_ was claimed by six or seven different authors, and though the value of the piece is not very great, it obtained great success. His defence of Piccini against the partisans of Gluck made him still more widely known. He hailed the first symptoms of the Revolution, joined Giuseppe Cerutti, the author of the _Mémoire pour le peuple français_ (1788), and others in producing the _Feuille villageoise_, a weekly paper addressed to the villages of France. He also celebrated in an indifferent ode the opening of the states-general. In his _Lettres sur les confessions de J.-J. Rousseau_ (1791) he defended the life and principles of his author. He was imprisoned during the Terror, and only escaped with life by the downfall of Robespierre. Some time after his release he assisted, as director-general of the "commission exécutive de l'instruction publique," in reorganizing the system of public instruction, and he was an original member of the Institute of France. In 1797 the directory appointed him minister plenipotentiary to the king of Sardinia. After fulfilling his duties for seven months, very little to the satisfaction of his employers, Ginguené retired for a time to his country house of St Prix, in the valley of Montmorency. He was appointed a member of the tribunate, but Napoleon, finding that he was not sufficiently tractable, had him expelled at the first "purge," and Ginguené returned to his literary pursuits. He was one of the commission charged to continue the _Histoire littéraire de la France_, and he contributed to the volumes of this series which appeared in 1814, 1817 and 1820. Ginguené's most important work is the _Histoire littéraire d'Italie_ (14 vols., 1811-1835). He was putting the finishing touches to the eighth and ninth volumes when he died on the 11th of November 1815. The last five volumes were written by Francesco Salfi and revised by Pierre Daunou. Entry: GINGUENÉ
The history of these twenty-one years, though (in consequence mainly of the diligence and luck as a collector of the above-named M. de Lovenjoul) the materials for it are large and constantly accumulating, has never been arranged in a really standard biography, and there seems to be an increasing habit of concentrating the attention on parts of it. It divides itself under three heads mainly, the history of Balzac's business affairs, that [v.03 p.0298] of his loves and friendships and that of his actual work. The first has some small resemblance to Scott's similar experiences, though in Balzac's case there was no great crash but a lifelong pressure; on the other hand, his debts were brought upon him by a long course not so much of extravagance in actual expenditure (though there was something of this) as of financial irregularities of almost every description,--anticipations of earnings, costly methods of production (he practically wrote his novels on a succession of printed revises), speculations, travel, and lastly the collection of curiosities. As regards the second, although his fashion of life made him by turns a hermit and a vagrant, he was on good terms with most of the famous men of letters of his day from Hugo downwards, and seems never to have quarrelled with any man, except with some of his editors and publishers, by his own fault. Balzac was indeed, in no belittling sense of the word, one of the most good-natured of men of genius. But his friendships with the other sex are of much more importance, and not in the least matters of mere gossip. His sister Laure, as has been said, and a school-friend of hers, Mme Zulma Carraud, played important and not questionable parts as his correspondents. But at least three ladies, all of a rank higher than his own, figure as his "Egerias" to such an extent that it is hardly extravagant to say that Balzac would not have been Balzac without them. These are Madame de Berny, a lady connected with the court of the _ancien régime_, much older than himself and the mother of nine children, to whom he was introduced in 1821, who became to him _La dilecta_, who was the original of Mme de Mortsauf in _Le Lys dans la vallée_, and who seems to have exercised an excellent influence on him in matters of taste till her death in 1836; the marquise de Castries, who took him up for a time and dropped him, and who has been supposed to have been his model for his less impeccable ladies of fashion; and lastly, the Polish-Russian countess Evelina Hanska, who after addressing, as _l'Étrangère_, a letter to him as early as 1832, became his idol, rarely seen but constantly corresponded with, for the last eighteen years, and his wife for the last few months of his life. Some of his letters to her have long been known, but the bulk of them constituted the greatest recent addition to our knowledge of him as given in the two volumes of _Lettres à l'étrangère_. Of hers we have practically none and it is exceedingly hard to form any clear idea of her, but his devotion is absolutely beyond question. Entry: BALZAC